From Hiroshima to Halabja – A Message of Peace and Reconciliation

Sheri Laizer | Exclusive to iKurd.net

Sheri Laizer talks with Masayo Sasaki about Hiroshima, September 6, 2023

The dancing white heads of the Sakura [1] in May

The dragging black feet of the ash in August

Hiroshima has grown up beyond its WW2 disaster and extreme experience of human tragedy. Its people have learned many lessons since President Truman dropped the first atomic bomb on August 6, 1945 at 8.15 in the morning.

I sat with Masayo as we turned the pages of her father and mother’s photograph albums. Born in the early 1920s both had been young adults when the A bomb was dropped on Hiroshima close to where they lived. Masayo told me their story and her own memories and impressions. She now teaches English to Japanese people in the UK and exhibits various things from her Japanese heritage. She also sells on handmade items for the charitable work of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation. Its message is “Cultivating a Culture of Peace in Civil Society.” [2]

Masayo begins by telling me: “My father, Masao, [3] was a Royal Japanese Navy cadet aged just 17 when he was on his way back from the city to the island college of Eta Jima off the coast of Hiroshima. Suddenly he saw the giant mushroom cloud. The windows of the train on the Hiroshima side were all shattered by the blast wind at that moment. (Eta Jima lies just about 50 kms away from Hiroshima Bay through the Kure shopping centre). The Japanese authorities then blacked out all the windows of the trains and trams so nobody could see anything outside.

My mother, Fukuyo (Fuku means ‘happy’) – had been educated in the Bishop Poole Memorial School for girls. It was wartime. She also kept a photograph album. She was in Hiroshima just a few days after the bomb. She would not tell me about Hiroshima until I was in my twenties. She had never wanted to talk about it. Her sister-in-law was married to a professor who was working in Hiroshima city at the time. Three days after the blast she had to go and find out if they were still alive, but she turned back. She made a second successful attempt ten days after the bomb, and she found them to be safe but said that everywhere human remains were still in the ash. The authorities gave her a safe pass health certificate because they needed to make sure there had been no reaction to the radioactivity or other side effects. She went on to work for the Red Cross. I was brought up as a Christian.”

Masayo’s mother, Fukuyo, had been educated at the Bishop Poole Memorial School for girls in Osaka. Her own mother had kept a guesthouse, and this was where Fukuyo later met Masayo’s father when he stayed there after the war. They fell in love: it was not an arranged marriage.

Masayo said, “My mother was 25 by then and she had me rather late in life in 1961 when she was in her thirties. Had the war not ended for the Japanese in August 1945 my father would have died as he was being trained to go on a mission as a suicide submarine bomber (kaiten) right at the end of the war. “ [4]

A parasol tree in Hiroshima also survived the blast and remains alive today almost eighty years later. Its flourishing is a reminder of survival in nature and a source of inspiration for visitors to the peace park.

Masayo’s early memories

Masayo recalled, “The Americans had dropped warning leaflets for the people of Hiroshima, but they had fallen on the beach or landed in the sea, and not in the city and those people living in the city had gone about their daily lives without knowing anything that was about to happen to them. The Japanese authorities quickly gathered up any leaflets found on the beach later. Afterwards, nothing remained of entire families unless they had been outside the vicinity of the blast.” (Between the two bombs dropped om Hiroshima and Nagasaki an estimated 200,000 people were killed).

Masayo went on, “When I was at primary school, I would go to shop with my mother in Hiroshima city. I saw a lot of crazy people all talking to themselves, so many had mental illnesses after the bomb. I was so young at the time, about eight years old, and was very shocked to see a man talking to me in the tram saying, ‘When you look at your guts its always black – the body is black, black, black.’ I had no idea about this as a young schoolgirl and when I asked my mother she would just say, ‘Put your hands over your ears and ignore them. ‘

“Sometimes in the department store there would be a man standing in front of a mirror there and he was talking to someone in the mirror. I felt a strange feeling, but I wasn’t told what it was all about. Later, at school, the teachers showed an American documentary film about the war. I couldn’t eat or go to the toilet after seeing this film.

Every year we had to pray for the people of the bombs. Every year on August 6 from 1st to 6th grade of normal school they showed the children these films. I was going to Tako School in the countryside, about 50 kms outside Hiroshima city. On 6th August you must go to school to remember Hiroshima and watch the films – all in black and white images. I never wanted to watch these things or go to see them out of curiosity. If you tell small children about these grotesque things, it will probably affect them forever. [7]

I think you have to appreciate how to live second by second because you never know what will happen at any moment.

When I was 21, I needed an operation on my leg, and I travelled to the state hospital in Hiroshima from where we were living in the countryside. I stayed there for about a month, firstly in a private room, or room for two, and then I was moved onto a ward of about six or seven women. All of them were victims from the bomb. The skin of their faces, necks and chests was no longer smooth and one woman’s face was like a patchwork from all the skin grafts she had had from her bottom. She asked if I was a Christian and when they all found out that I was they wanted to talk to me and began chatting. They had virtually been living in the hospital for all those years.

One had blood problems and the neck of the one with years of skin grafts could no longer move. She would come back to the hospital after fainting outside.

Another of the women said, ‘Touch me! Feel it.’ There were shards of glass moving throughout her body and she thought the glass would travel to her heart and so she wanted me to feel across her and find where the glass was. Her arms were full of particles of glass. She had been living in the hospital in Hiroshima since she was young. She had been standing in her family’s vinegar shop at the moment she saw the bomb blast.”

A culture of strength and beauty

“When a girl is born her mother buys her a doll, dressed in a fine kimono. Japanese craftsmen began making these dolls in the 1940s. When a boy is born, the parents buy him a carp made of cloth, or a Samurai mask… I think beauty and ugliness goes back-to-back.”

In terms of beauty, the tea ceremony features at the centre of this (in beauty). You have to know about the flower arrangements (ikebana) in the room, the cooking, placing of the incense, the ceramics used in the tea sets, the vases for the flowers, the lacquer ware and which one to use and when and for the right time of day. There are a hundred ways to make tea depending on who is the guest, what season it is, how and when to serve so there is always a combination of many elements demanding skill including Japanese calligraphy. Sometimes you need to write a haiku poem or compose a menu as to what is to be served; you are writing to welcome the guest and to present the guest with the menu. Good quality pottery used in the ceremony has a distinctive name such as the ‘chrysanthemum’ and if is of very high value then it is signed by the head of the tea ceremony.

In the house of my teacher for the tea ceremony, there were many expensive things as she had no children. I was just four years old when I began learning about it. At that age, my mother would dress me in a kimono, or the housekeepers would help to dress to take me to the tea ceremony. We were told the rules very clearly and how all ceremonies come from philosophy. For example, if the teacup has a flower pattern this must be turned towards the guest – the back of a cup must not face a guest. My teacher for the tea ceremony had bought a temple and used it in the garden of her property. A series of small private steppingstones led to the temple which had become part of the house. The bowl she used was worth about £15,000 so when I was eight, and I knew how expensive it was, it was very frightening to make any mistake.

Before I left Japan in 1999, as my mother had passed away at the age of 71, she had left me all the kimonos that had been handed down to her over four or five generations and there were more than 200 of them. She had been an only child and so was I so they all came to me. There was a special room to keep these things safe and then I had to look after them when she died. I gave away some 50-60 of them. I was told how to fold and care for them, and you wouldn’t touch them unless you wore gloves some were so delicate. They should be kept folded in paper like the lacquerware. You always use gloves for silk kimonos to preserve them. When I held exhibitions in the UK, I had to ask people not to touch them but in Japan you educate a child about how to treat these things and how to behave properly…”

Nagasaki’s Christian Population

For seven generations Christians in Japan had observed their faith in secret on pain of torture or death. It was not until after the Meiji Restoration that led to the opening of Japan, that freedom of religious belief was permitted. Christians then built a cathedral in the Urakami district of Nagasaki where thousands of Christians also died in the bomb that was dropped there, three days after Hiroshima. The second A bomb hit the centre of Ukrami. The head of a wooden statue of Mary survived the blast, although her glass eyes melted. It became an icon of hope for Nagasaki’s Christians. [8]

Hiroshima Nagasaki Declaration of Nobel Peace Laureates

In 2009, a group of Nobel Peace Prizewinners signed a joint declaration to stand against the nuclear bomb, part of which reads:

“…As this process unfolds, world leaders will be faced with a stark choice: nuclear nonproliferation or nuclear brinkmanship. We can either put an end to proliferation, and set a course toward abolition; or we can wait for the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be repeated.

We believe it is long past time for humanity to heed the warning made by Albert Einstein in 1946: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”

As Nobel Peace Laureates, we call on the citizens of the world to press their leaders to grasp the peril of inaction and summon the political will to advance toward nuclear disarmament and abolition. To fulfill a world without nuclear weapons, and inspire a greater peace among our kind, humanity must stand together to make this vision a reality.”

May 18, 2009 [9]

The laureates included Iranian opposition activist, Shirin Abadi.

Oppenheimer – Film Director Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece on the scientific advances that led up to the A Bomb

In the box office hit film, Oppenheimer, focusing on the lives and work of the scientists whose discoveries paved the way for the first atomic bomb, key role player, Robert Oppenheimer, expressed his subsequent horror and opposition to atomic and nuclear armaments. His reaction after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was coolly received by President Truman who had ordered the bombings.

That same mentality continues to drive the US and UK’s renewal of nuclear weapons despite the extreme risks to humanity and the Earth. Nuclear warfare threats characterize the Ukraine-Russia debacle.

A simple lesson from Hiroshima for the Kurds

The tragedy of the people of the Kurdish town of Halabja was a tragedy made in Kurdistan by the Kurdish leadership owing to their alliance with Iran against their own country. [10] Since the chemical attacks on the town at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Halabja has been used for propaganda purposes rather than reconciliation. Their victimhood has been bartered rather than cultivating a culture for peace in civil society as promoted in Hiroshima. [11] The KDP and PUK that divide Iraqi Kurdistan between themselves still use Halabja as a weapon and cannot even reconcile their own internal differences.

The memorial monument that was put up on the edge of the town after regime change by the Kurdish powers in 2003 was imposed on the people without consultation. The incongruous A bomb form is a Stalinist like monstrosity, despised by many of the locals to the extent that in 2006, they organized a protest over the neglect of the town and the structure was torched. The protest became violent. [12]

In some ways to have left the Halabja monument that way rather than restoring it would have been more fitting. An ugly bomb structure in metal set in a concrete arena is not an apt tribute to the victims of death by chemical and biological weapons. It offers no reconciliation, nor is there any integration with Nature. Conventional shells with chemical warheads were dropped on Halabja, not the atomic bomb. The townspeople saw white puffs of smoke and smelled apples before they died or fled…they did not see a mushroom cloud tower over their heads ballooning up into the sky.

The Barzani-Talabani Kurdish leadership has built more significant monuments to themselves to glorify their own families than for the families of Halabja. The American University in Dohuk that opened with a commemoration of Mulla Mustafa Barzani’s birthday as Kurdish warrior role is a prime example. [13] The building has no Kurdish cultural resonance. It is out of place with the landscape and with the old Kurdish spirit of resistance. Masrour Barzani, his grandson, now prime minister of the Kurdistan region, delivered an oratory at the opening event, saying, “My extended family has been deeply committed to the promotion of the educational initiative…therefore, the building that we are opening today is named after General Mullah Mustafa Barzani.”

The ‘educational initiative’ has involved rich Kurdish parents buying degrees for their spoiled darlings and sacking teachers that would not collude in it. The university initiatives are gold mines for the rulers of Kurdistan. [14]

In contrast, the tawdry Halabia memorial structure is stolid, and lifeless. Ironically, it resembles some of the cruder 1980s Ba’ath era war monuments – a considerable number of which the pro-Iran militias have since had destroyed. A badly rendered statue of Halabja’s baker, Shivan, cradling his dead baby lies on a plinth in front of the bomb structure and divorced from it aesthetically. An earlier plaster version of Shivan trying to shield his child that was first put up at the entrance to the town was more lifelike, and more meaningful in its directness and simplicity. People used to lay spring flowers on it.

Halabja’s former deputy governor lamented about the town’s ongoing status dilemma as a new governorate saying:“The KRG still sometimes forgets the writings, decisions, and recommendations about Halabja governorate. The Iraqi government forgets about Halabja and doesn’t treat it as a governorate. They only remember Halabja in terms of license plates for cars.” [15]

Additionally, there is something intrinsically wrong about flying a national flag in front of a memorial of this kind in extolling a narrow nationalism. The flag of the Iranian Islamic Republic should perhaps be flying alongside it for both played key roles in the town’s fate. It is the graves on the hillside overlooking the town that are the real memorial…

Nuclear ambitious Iran and Halabja’s legacy

This June, the deputy governor of Halabja, Shaheen Reza, opened a new border crossing with the Islamic Republic of Iran.16

It was this same alliance with the Islamic fundamentalist clerics ruling Iran that paved the way for the attack on Halabja. It is the same misalliance between the Shi’a Arabs in Baghdad and their pro-Iran militia forces that has put the future of the country in peril today.

The latest clashes in Kirkuk are just a taste of what may be coming. [17] Nowhere at government level is there a will for reconciliation or for peace.

In a profound sense, the clerics in Iran and their proxies in Iraq have everything to learn from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that took place almost eighty years ago. [18] Japan’s premier, Shinzo Abe, warned Iran in 2019 of the consequences of an “accidental conflict” in 2019 and in August 2023, Japan’s foreign minister, Joshimasa Hayashi, expressed concerns over Iran’s advancing uranium enrichment programme as well as Iranian combat drones being supplied to Russia. [19] The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant is still unstable after the earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011 – a very consequential nuclear accident. [20] Iran is as prone to earthquakes as those that befell Turkey and Syria on February 6, 2023.

The culmination of this story might seem like a digression from the initial interview I conducted with Masayo Sasaki, but the same issues lie at the heart of it. 200,00 lives were sacrificed and the generations since include many that are physically and mentally scarred.

One person’s memories may still become another’s worst nightmares – that is the risk that faces all of us given many of the feckless leaders the world currently hosts.

As Ben Norton recently emphasised, “US government documents have admitted that Japan was already on the verge of surrendering in 1945, before the nuclear strikes. It was simply not necessary to use the atomic bomb…The nuclear strikes on Japan represented a political decision taken by the United States, aimed squarely at the Soviet Union; it was the first strike in the Cold War...” [21]

The film, Oppenheimer raises the same arguments.

American policy remains as duplicitous as that of Iran, and the destruction of Iraq is testimony to another of the United States’ greatest blunders. [22]

[4] Some additional historic notes on Hiroshima

Kaiten were Japanese Royal Navy suicide submarine and torpedo craft pilots called Japan’s human torpedos. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1962/january/kaitenjapans-human-torpedoes. On the island of Kushima, lying off the Shiman prefecture in the Sea of Japan, an extensive arsenal of five-man Koryu midget submarines were loaded with explosives to be used against the Allied fleet in case of an invasion.

Eta jima lay just off the bay of Hiroshima from Kure where the Japanese naval base was situated. Today, Eta Jima is the Officer Candidate School (OCS) of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF), where the Royal or Imperial Navy’s traditions and past history are preserved, training Japan’s post-war naval officers.

As part of the US Strategic Bombing Survey undertaken in Japan at the end of the war, American military personnel took photographs of the aftermath of the A-bomb attacks on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the photograph above, the former cultural centre, with the Dome rising from the Hiroshima Peace Park still stands on the right bank of the Motoyasu River. Behind it is the Aioi Bridge – the original target of the A-bomb with the partially destroyed Motoyasu Bridge in front. American soldiers can just be seen on reconnaissance in the rubble to the left. (US Military Archive). [5]

The Naval College where Masayo’s father trained was on Eta Jima Island, opposite Kure.
Hiroshima Bay was ideal for maneuvering small crafts for its depth and size so from the outset, the Japanese Navy trained its submarine forces there. ”The Submarine School trained all the crews of the midget submarines of the type that were deployed in the Pearl Harbor attack, and would have later been deployed in large numbers to defend the homeland. The Kure Naval Yard opposite was not only the greatest dockyard in Japan, but also the largest arsenal, especially in such heavy industries as the manufacture of steel armor plates and large-caliber guns.” The thickest armor the Japanese ever made and the greatest (18-inch) naval guns the Japanese made were produced there, and armed the Yamato and the Musashi battleships. The Base held a substantial portion of the war stocks of ammunition and fuel… and had been used as a center for fleet operations from the beginning of the Pacific War until the spring of 1945, when Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet annihilated the remainder of the Japanese fleet in Hiroshima Bay.

1 Sakura is the Japanese for ‘cherry blossom’
2 https://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/hpcf/english/
3 Masao means ‘politics’ and Masayo, was named after him.
5 “In 1973, 1,205 photographs related to the atomic bombing, including images taken by Japanese photographers that had been confiscated by the U.S. military, were returned to Hiroshima. In 1974, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and in 1978, the Japan Peace Museum, a citizens’ group based in Tokyo, began obtaining photographs held by the National Archives. It is estimated that there are about 1,000 photos of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, after copies of the same photos are excluded.” Sourced from https://www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/?gallery=2011063015205199_en
6 https://time.com/3978544/hiroshima-dome-photos/
7 It reminded this author of what the children of Mosul were forced to see during the occupation by ISIS and the subsequent war atrocities. Where is their monument?
8 https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2015/10/08/nagasakis-hidden-christians-survive-persecution-and-the-atomic-bomb/
9 https://www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/mediacenter_d/en/hiroshima-nagasaki/index.html
10
11 https://ikurd.net/the-suffering-halabja-2023-03-16
12 https://www.pbs.org/americarebuilds2/memorial/memorial_halabja.html
13 https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/story/9454-VIDEO:-American-University-of-Kurdistan-opens-in-Duhok-
14 https://diplomafraud.com/2013/04/04/authorities-investigate-fake-education-certificates-in-iraq%E2%80%8F%E2%80%8Fs-kurdistan-region-%E2%80%8E/
15 https://peregraf.com/en/investigation/5315
16 https://www.agenzianova.com/en/news/iraq-iran-aperto-un-nuovo-valico-di-frontiera-nel-kurdistan-iracheno/
17 https://ikurd.net/irans-grip-on-kirkuk-2023-03-04
18 https://www.outlookindia.com/international/explained-top-us-general-says-iran-could-make-nuclear-bomb-in-months-what-it-means-why-it-bothers-us-news-273309
19 https://apnews.com/article/japan-iran-russia-ukraine-9a0f791fd47110999ac6a80f042f3a85
20 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/24/timeline-cleaning-up-the-fukushima-disaster
21 https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/08/07/atomic-bombing-japan-not-necessary/
22 This is not to overlook Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria etc. nor now, Ukraine.

Related posts:

The Suffering of Halabja The Resurrection (Ba’ath) Party – Before the Iran-Iraq War The Suffocation of Iraq Kurdistan Kurds in Japan face abusive labels from far-right groups Iraq: Revenge and Corruption Ethnic Kurds in Japan face rising online hate and discrimination: report The Truth About The Saddam Hussein Affair Saddam Hussein was a Friend to the West Why is there no Kurdish Barbie doll? Sabotaging Syria